After a Memorial Service
Someone loved by a close friend died recently, and today I went to the memorial reception. Some things were exemplary of Louisiana: the boiled crawfish, shrimp, muffalettas, boudin balls, catfish, and jambalaya on offer. Shouting children from all branches of the family filled the spaces in conversation left by trailing recollections of the departed: one memory, another, a tentative laugh over some bit of recalled ribaldry, then sighs. And then the children running in the distance, a beautiful day for play affording us all the luxury of hearing them. These were the sounds of the gathering. These are the sounds of past and future.
The program from the service included letters to the deceased’s from his wife and two young sons; all three mentioned that he was in Heaven, that his death was the will of God, and one son mentioned that someday he’d join his dad there. All sorrows can be born if they are part of a story, it is said. Who are we to try and destroy one another’s stories? Why are all stories in competition?
As I looked at a photograph of the dead man and his family, his mother –very old, perhaps senile –came up behind me and said, “That’s my boy who died,” just like that. Moments later, his son charged through the room and out onto the front lawn, face reddened and contorted as he was again overcome by grief. When he returned, he brusquely and with obvious effort at self-control asked if someone would please turn off the television playing the slide show of his father, which had been repeating for hours. Someone did. The son then changed and went for a run. The last time I saw him, he seemed to be smirking. At what? At the peripheral mourners, I thought: what the hell do they know about it? But maybe I just felt guilty that I couldn’t share more of his grief.
On the drive back to the office, everything I saw neutrally announced its impermanence, but that neutrality was offensive to me: I am upset at loss. The cigarette butts along the side of the highway, mixed with pebbles and trash and the detritus of commuters: they formed small spatial scenes out of which could be composed an entire world but which would wash away with the next rain. Closed shops seemed like unkempt tombs for the aspirations of ordinary people, and who knows what failed with them: security, marriage, life itself? Felled trees across the ground retained the frozen gestures of their branches: they had grown old, grown hard, towered in the forest only to fall, as everything must.
